chapter 4: the historic empires:

further differentiation of the society from its legitimating cultural system

 

  China, 73

  India, 80

  The Islamic empires, 86

  The Roman empire, 90

  Conclusion, 98

 

The varieties of primitive and intermediate societies cannot usefully be regarded as comprising larger systems in the sense of the system of modern societies.  This difference presents interpretive problems that will guide by discussion of advanced intermediate societies, problems the significance of  which was demonstrated by Max Weber.  The range of the variation among advanced intermediate societies was wide – think if the contrast between the Chinese Empire at its height, the Indian caste system, the Islamic empires, and the Roman Empire!  All these societies contained developed civilizations.  Why, then, did the breakthrough to modernizations not occur in any of the Oriental advanced intermediate civilizations?  Conversely, what constellation of factors were involved in its occurrence against the background of the most radical structural regression in the history of major societies – namely, the fall of the western Roman Empire and the reversion of its territories to archaic social conditions in the dark ages?  This is the historical-interpretive perspective as distinct from that of systematic theory, which will guide my evolutionary analysis. 

 

            This chapter will discuss four cases of the advanced intermediate type of society.  All developed independent political organizations on a large scale and integrated large populations and territories, but they had varying success in achieving stability and maintaining independence.  All of then depended in some way upon cultural developments which separate then from the archaic type of society discussed in Chapter 3.  With the partial exception of China, they have been involved with the world religions in a sense not applicable to any archaic society. The genesis of these types of societies lies outside the scope of the present discussion.  Certain regularities of pattern, both in level achieved and in their ranges of variation, will be our concern, along with the problem of why none of these societies, developing upon their own resources, attained modernity. 

 

72  THE HISTORIC EMPIRES

 

            The systems selected for my study are China, India, the Islamic Empires, and Rome.  They will be treated in that order, which is one of development toward the modern type of society.  China and India were minimally influenced by the cultural movements which underlay Western society.  India was influenced by Creek culture and by Judaism, via Islam, after the Islamic incursions, but such influences came late in its development.  Islam and Rome were influenced by Israel and Greece.¹ 

 

            The societies treated in this chapter were characterized by the comprehensiveness of their cultural innovations at the level of constitutive symbolism. They were the direct heirs of cultural movements called philosophic breakthroughs.  The common feature of these movements - one that crosscut their differences in orientation - was the attainment of higher levels of generalization in the constitutive symbolism of their cultures.  This attainment posed problems concerning the coming to terms of the new cultural orientations with the societal structures in which they arose or to which they were diffused. 

 

            I shall not analyze the processes that generated these breakthroughs or attempt to assess the relative roles of various cultural and social factors.  The breakthroughs occurred within a relatively short time span in several different societies from the eastern Mediterranean (in Greece and Israel), through India, to China about the middle of the first millenium, B.C.  My concern is with the implications of these changes for institutionalization in large-scale societies - on the scale that the major powers of the time had already achieved.  For the breakthroughs of China and India, these implications were direct; but for those of Israel and Greece, they concern heir-societies, including Islam and Rome.  The direct processes in Israel and Greece will be discussed in the next chapter, and the Christian heir-societies will be considered in Chapters 6 and 7. 

 

¹ As a general reference source on these societies, a  well as several others (e.g., Persia, see S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963). 

 

THE HISTORIC EMPIRES  73

 

            In the terms of our analytical scheme, the cultural breakthroughs - however they may have come about - affected the societal community structures of the societies in which they occurred or to which they were diffused.  These cultural movements led to a differentiation between the order of representations of ultimate reality and the order of representation of the human condition.  Any human being's pretension to divine status became out of the question; hence the institution of divine kingship was terminated with the archaic period.  But the sharpness of the newly posed dichotomy between the supernatural and the natural orders accentuated the problem of defining the relation of human elements to the higher-order reality.  This undermined the archaic tendency - conspicuous in Egypt - to proliferate status gradations.  It tended to introduce a dichotomy between the human elements having, and those who have not, the capacity to act directly in terms of the new conception of the ultimate order.  Hence, a new type of two-class structuring of the human society was a consequence of these cultural innovations.  Society came to be divided between those who are, actually or potentially, qualified for the highest human standing relative to the cultural definition of the transcendent order and those who are excluded from such qualification, either inherently or until they meet specific conditions of eligibility. 

 

            The imposition of this dichotomy upon established societies involved complex readjustments, which worked out in different ways in the different cases I will discuss.  One generalization applies to all the societies in which this situation was introduced and in which its institutionalization was attempted on a large scale.  There had to be eventual acceptance of the fact that the going society must include persons who could not meet the criteria of relatedness to the higher order of cultural standards that grounded the cultural definitions of desirable belonging.  Chinese society bad to include common people who were not "superior men";

India had the Sudra and outcasts who were not eligible for the discipline of religious enlightenment; Islam had the infidels who would not convert to the true faith; and Rome has the barbarians within her polity.  By contrast, a trend in modern societies is the presumption of the possibility of including all persons subject to political jurisdiction in full membership status within the single societal community. 

 

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